Dave Barnhart breaks down his March 19 trades on SPY and QQQ, hitting targets on both the up and downside. SPY ranged from bullish above 661.50 to bearish below 659, with a low near his 655.58 target. QQQ showed similar whipsaw action, mostly penny-scale scalps driven by institutional trade prints and volume.
Chapters
Good afternoon, traders. It's Thursday, March 19th at 2:58 PM. Let's review our trade setups for today. We had SPY and we had the QQQs. We were down quite a bit, and so let's look at this on the SPY. We had gapped down. We're just, uh, not much going on today. We pulled back. We're sitting here right on my 200 exponential moving average, and we tagged the 200 simple, and then we're just sitting there. And there's waning volume, but there—that's what's going on there. So we were bullish above 661.50 and bearish below 659. So the 661.50—it—that got us in early on. That stopped us out, right? This got us into this print here, and yeah, it didn't hit our first target. Our first target was 662.21, and the high there was 662.06. So we were 15 cents from our first target. I'm As far as paperwork is concerned, that one's a stop out. And then bearish below 659. So we were mapping this out around here. So there were a couple entry points. There was 659 at a target there, 658.51. So I'm not sure if anybody would have captured that, but this started rolling over earlier from the 660 level. We can see there was a little bit of increasing volume here and breaking below. This had tested this quite a bit. Pre-market. And so we've got a break, retest, break, and we've— I always talk about this 4 and 8 exponential moving average running together, and that's what actually happened all the way down to our target $655.58. And that happened right here at 9:35, hit our low, was $655.32, and that was the low of the day there, just within 20 cents of our target. So This actually was pretty good, upthrusted, but then over by 9:35. So most of this occurred pre-market on the downside, and then we just kind of whipsawed between these pivots and cams for the day. So our range really was from 655 to 659. There was a 4-point move just back and forth for the whole day. And if you want to see what the institutions were doing, let's click this little button there. Look what they were doing. The orange is all real-time prints. So when you're wondering why are we going sideways the whole time, look at this: 200,000, 54K, 100K, you know, all of that sort of stuff sitting here right in the middle. And so they report these trades after the trade is filled, then it's going. So we're starting to, we're starting to move up a little bit here. We've got this breaking through some prints, so we're coming up to my peanut butter and jelly. But this is interesting here. So we've, we've pulled back and now we're taking off across the VWAP. Let's see, there will be some rebalancing towards the end of the day. We'll see if this pushes back up to these prints, maybe 662, if we can get back up here. And we'll see towards the end of the day. So yeah, that was, that was a bit of a tough trade. It was— most of it was pre-market, and then if you were going to scalp this There were just pennies to be made, maybe a dollar here and there if you were diligent. Let's go ahead and look at the QQQs. Okay, so the QQQs were bullish above 594.12, bearish below 591.75. So the 594.12, same thing stopped us out. 594.85, my first target was 595. So 15 cents there, and then we started to roll over this white line. Here is the VWAP. So bearish below 591.75 would have been right down here. So this pulled back and would have around 735, same thing as the SPY, break, retest of that level. We've got our 4 and 8 exponential moving average, and then this broke, retest, and then all the way down here. And we had our target, it blew through our target here. The low here was 587.11, and I had 587.58 and 586.30. Which would have been this cam down here that actually didn't hold. And then same thing, just whipsawed in and out. And let's see what we had for prints there for the day as well. You can see the queues. So this is interesting because when you're watching this during the day and you see one print come in and then you see the reaction to it, then you see another one and you see another one. And as we come down and they either buy more or it holds and they move up and test other ones, that's print pong. So here Yeah, this is them manipulating the price with smaller share sizes, and we'll see where we go tomorrow. I'll turn this off. And so we've come down and held the 200 exponential. We're testing the 200 simple, and let's see if we can come back. This is kind of the ice here. If we're looking horizontally here, if I draw a horizontal line. Right here, then I'll turn that off. If I draw a horizontal line, this is the ice we've broken below all of this, and if we come back up and test this and break below again, increasing volume, then I think maybe we'll we'll move down a little bit lower, probably 580 down to 575, 570. On that one. Okay, there you have it. Those are results of your trade setups for today. So please like, share, subscribe. It was a bit of a difficult day. It was a it was a big move on the downside yesterday, especially with FOMC, and then we gapped down, and then we just kind of held the bottom for a bit. So we'll see what goes on tomorrow and into Monday. Okay, happy trading everyone. We'll see you in the morning. MobyTick has partnered with TrendSpider to bring real-time institutional trades to your charts. Click the link in the description below for more details.
